The Peaceable Kingdom by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose [Prose, Francine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780374230425
Publisher: Henry Holt
Published: 1993-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

POTATO WORLD

ALL SPRING I WAITED for something to save me from working that summer. That was how I wound up at Potato World. A sixtyish Frenchwoman named Yvette owned the franchise at the mall. She interviewed me for two seconds and said, “You are my new sous-chef!” My job was to scrub the potatoes and preroast them in the microwave. Ronnie, the counterman, finished them off with the customer’s choice of topping. I was shocked by how many people ordered ratatouille-stuffed baked potatoes; maybe that was because I’d seen the industrial-size ratatouille cans.

Yvette came in at the end of the day to empty the cash register. Otherwise, Ronnie and I were pretty much on our own. Ronnie had a double mohawk: two parallel brushes down his scalp, like a tool for de-icing car windows. When I asked him what the color was called, Ronnie said, “Fiberglass pink.”

Ronnie wore two thin copper bracelets to block the toxins in the potatoes from creeping up his arms. I often wanted to borrow them, but I was embarrassed to ask. The potatoes came in fifty-pound sacks, and each time I reached in, clouds of powdery dirt and pesticide puffed up into my face.

Around lunchtime my boyfriend, Jason, came in, his face still messy from sleep. He and Ronnie and I smoked dope in the back of the kitchen. Jason said, “I’ll say potato world. This whole town is potato world.”

“Potato planet,” said Ronnie.

We had a phone near the cash register that no one ever called in on. So when it rang in the morning, I’d know it was Jason for me. He called on his bedroom phone; he was working on his dreams. He claimed this was his summer job; his mother and father were rich. Jason was into the Iroquois, who told the whole clan their dreams, and an African tribe who encouraged you to go back into your dream and face the tiger that woke you the last time. Jason was experimenting with dream communication; he’d tell me what he’d dreamed and ask if the images matched anything I’d been thinking that morning. His idea was to program himself to dream about eco-disaster and nuclear strikes and then he would dream through them and wake up with a solution. I closed my eyes and let his voice stream over me like rain. I said, “Will you still like me when I turn into a potato?”

He said, “There isn’t time for that. We’ll be back in school before then.” As we talked on the phone, I studied the sign above the counter, hand-in-hand smiley international potatoes in serapes and coolie hats. This was definitely not my idea of what a potato was. I was becoming increasingly weird about the potato sacks. There was something about the powderiness, the darkness deep inside—half the time I was positive I’d reach down there and grab a rat.

One afternoon I was steeling myself for a dip into the potatoes when I heard a familiar voice order a giant fries.

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